Ease the effort of installing packages which are masked either by package.mask or keyword

Show the user the functionality of portage as the installation by path is now obsolete and never was a good idea

Requirements

some editor, bash and portage

What it does
I suggest 2 aliases and one function. The two aliases aren't really special but may come in handy: they allow you to fire up portage and let you see only the installed/not installed packages. i know that qpkg (which is a tool in portage too) can do more or less the same thing. still, i don't need another package (which means remembering the tool and syntax for it). and i'm used to the printout of portage - which is different with qpgk. with my two aliases it looks alike.
example:

For more information, see MASKED PACKAGES section in the emerge man page or
section 2.2 "Software Availability" in the Gentoo Handbook.

now in order to emerge a package you'll have to select the appropriate lines and add them to /etc/portage.mask and/or /etc/portage.keywords. now this is annyoing, isn't it? try to emerge the login manager entrance - you'll have to memorize 8 entries and add them to /etc/portage.keywords, very annoying. my function now selects those entries and depending on the mask reason open an editor and the appropriate file and paste it into the files (with the commented date of modification).
example:

as there was a package which was masekd by package.mask my function opened package.unmask too:

Code:

### entry added on 14.11.2004 ###
=net-im/licq-1.2.7

the beauty of vi(m) is you're able to open several files and switch between them with hitting ':' (doublepoint), writing 'buffer ' (mind the emtpy space after 'buffer') and using <TAB> to select another file.
all you have to do now is what you'd have to do anyway: considering which of the masked package you want to install and removing the entries you don't want (hitting ':dd' to remove a hole line withi vim). after that you write the file and exit and may emerge your package as usual.

How to do it

open your /root/.bashrc (if not existing create it) and add the following lines to it: